Happy City by Charles Montgomery

Source of book: I own this – a gift from my brother-in-law

I was born and raised in a Los Angeles suburb - specifically the San Fernando Valley (of Valley Girl and Free Fallin’) on the north side of the city. Southern California is pretty much ground zero for car culture - and traffic. And, in fact, traffic has gotten substantially worse since I left in the early 1990s. And even more than that, sprawl has accelerated, to the point where many are making commutes of two hours or more. Meanwhile, California has a huge housing shortage in the coastal cities, which has caused housing prices to soar out of the reach of most middle class people, let alone working class. Los Angeles is estimated to have between 50,000 and 100,000 homeless. This is, shall we say, not sustainable.

Happy City is a look at urban planning, and what increases, rather than decreases, human happiness in our urban areas. Montgomery looks at cities around the world, and draws some fascinating conclusions. 

It should be no surprise that our current American approach to city planning is terrible. Long commutes, pollution, and traffic are hardly conducive to happiness. But problematic too are the smaller-level issues. With the exception of a few downtown areas (which tend now to gentrify and become unaffordable to most), our cities are not walkable. You either own a car, or you end up isolated, essentially housebound. I can attest to this from my professional experience. Bakersfield is practically one big suburb, with a pathetic bus system which only works if you live and work near a stop AND can hit exact times to get on and off. Or you can easily wait an hour or longer for another. And that is all we have as far as public transportation. And good luck if you want to live in a dense area. We have (by my count), all of two residential buildings of more than three stories - in a metropolitan area with 800,000 people. And those two buildings are a public housing apartment tower, and a senior living complex. Oh, and I think we only have three commercial buildings more than five stories high. Density is not our thing, which is why farmland has disappeared at an alarming rate.

I mention all this to just give a bit of a picture of the problem. Happy City gets much more into the details, of course, and looks at both the root causes of and ways to fix the problem.

To begin with, Montgomery notes that we have seen a massive privatization of public space. For example, roads once were open to everyone, regardless of their method of travel. Now, that space is mostly reserved for private cars. Urban design itself has been remade to favor automobiles: mandated parking, which increases distance between buildings; neighborhoods built around car ownership rather than walkability; segregation of shopping, employment, and housing; gated communities to keep parks private rather than public; and so on. Here in Bakersfield, the results are pretty obvious. It is nearly impossible to function without a car, we have a high pedestrian and bicycle rider fatality and injury rate, we have some of the highest pollution in the nation, and the cost of maintaining our roads means our pavement is crumbling.

The social costs are high too. Compared to my childhood, I really don’t know my neighbors that well, and kids don’t tend to play in the streets. (Obviously, technology and overscheduling are factors, but so is the trend toward front yards being for show, not common use.)  Oh, and commutes don’t help either. When people aren’t home, they can’t really interact.

None other than Adam Smith (whose legacy has been co-opted by Social Darwinist economists) pointed out that our human conscience comes from our social relationships. If you want to understand at least a part of our current hate-filled xenophobic moment, it helps to realize that we don’t really live with each other that much - we live in our cubicles and our cars, and then in front of our televisions. (Or books in my case…) Our cities do not, by and large, foster interaction. The author quotes Aristotle on this point:

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

I very much agree that our social connections are in many ways contracting. The internet has actually worked against the general trend, by giving alternate ways to connect, but the problem itself existed before the internet. It was created in significant part by our design around cars - everyday interactions happen less when you go from garage to garage to parking lot to parking lot.

Montgomery also examines why we ended up with cities carefully segregated. And I don’t mean primarily by race, but by function. Careful separation of the commercial and industrial from the residential. Careful separation of low income tenement housing from the wealthy - can’t have the dirty poor infect you, right? And yes, the use of redlining, zoning, building regulations, and other methods to keep the skin colors separate. (There is a section on this exact issue.) What this has come to mean is that there is really very little freedom when it comes to how cities grow and develop. Things stay the same by the force of law, custom, and habits. The author quotes Georgia Tech professor Ellen Dunham- Jones:

“We have not had a free market in real estate for eighty years. And because it is illegal to build in a different way, it takes an immense amount of time for anyone who wants to do it to get changes in zoning and variance. Time is money for developers, so it rarely happens.”

The result, the author points out, is this:

Together, these rules and habits have ensured that the American city is as separated and static as any Soviet-era housing scheme. They have ensured that first-generation suburbs closer to downtowns do not grow more diverse or dense. They have pushed new development out to the ever-expanding urban frince and beyond...and they have ensured that these new developments will, in turn, resist most efforts to change or adapt them over time.

The factors compound each other too. In one chapter, the author mentions a study that put the ideal commute time at about 16 minutes. Which I agree with, by the way. That number is also my typical commute - for all its sprawl, Bakersfield hasn’t yet developed crippling traffic. I have considered alternatives to my car, but they are not great. Biking in lawyer clothes isn’t feasible, and I don’t have a shower at work. But even during the good weather (we top 105 regularly during the summer), I worry I would get hit by our inattentive drivers. And I already mentioned the sorry state of our transit.

Come to think of it, why IS transit so poor most places in the United States? Again, we have a self-feeding loop. Because transit sucks, the only people who use it are those who have no choice. Which then means low ridership and a stigma in the bargain. And without riders, budgets are low, so the equipment tends to be bare-bones. As the author puts it:

When transit is seen as a handout to the poor, politicians tend not to invest beyond the most basic levels of service.

In contrast, in a city where everyone rides, there is a shared commitment to making transit work well. The one metro area in California where this works at least a bit is the Bay Area, which has sufficient busses, trams, and trains to serve at least the city centers. It is possible to leave one’s car and take transit all day in San Francisco - we have done it often when we visit. Even better are European cities - I have never driven a car in Europe, because the transit is good and the cities are walkable.

Another point by the author that I strongly agree with is that we have become far too fixated on astronomically expensive subways, rather than looking at the obvious: we have plenty of places to run trams, trains, and busses: we just need to remove the cars from them. If I could run the city of Los Angeles, that would be my approach. Shut down a bunch of lanes - and roads - and run transit. Speeds would be far faster than the gridlock they have right now, and cost would be far lower.

The main obstacle to this kind of thinking is, of course, that those entrenched interests who benefit from our current subsidies of car ownership aren’t all that interested in giving way for anyone else. The author ties this into a general problem of the last 50 or so years, where we assume that private wealth has more right to our space than everyone else.

Who should share in the public wealth of the city? Who should have access to parks and beautiful places? Who should have the privilege of easy mobility? The questions are as much political as philosophical.

The author quotes one-time mayor of Bogota and reformer Penalosa as advocating for a radical vision of fairness.

“One of the requirements for happiness is equality. Maybe not equality of income, but equality of quality of life and, more than that, an environment where people don’t feel inferior, where people don’t feel excluded….We’re telling people, ‘You are important - not because you’re rich, but because you are human.’”

This is so very true. And, given our national history of obsession with making people feel their inferiority, it is easy to see why reform has been so difficult.

I also loved Montgomery’s recognition of who suffers most from these inequalities. The elderly and children lose safe mobility. Minority neighborhoods tend to lack sidewalks, crosswalks, and signals, making them more dangerous. He notes that this has led to a much higher pedestrian fatality rate for African American children in Atlanta - because crosswalks might require a detour of two miles, children would dash across the busy roads.

In what should come as no surprise, a major force against reform in urban design turns out to be...wait for it...the Tea Party movement! (Did you see that coming? I certainly did.) Here in California, it is the Right which opposes pretty much any spending on public transit. Or even raising gas taxes high enough to cover road maintenance costs. Those Republicans LOVE their welfare - the heavy subsidies of their lifestyles. And, they turn out to actually love near-totalitarian government...when it benefits them. As already noted, our city planning is centralized, and strict, and the pure opposite of free. (This whole chapter is fascinating - and the conspiracy theories spouted by the Tea Partiers are nuts.)

I have experienced this first hand, living in a fairly conservative city. (Very conservative by California standards.) You wonder why we have no high apartment buildings? Well, that’s because getting a permit for one is practically impossible. Not just because of regulations, but because the NIMBY contingent will come out and protest anything that looks like letting low income people live near them. And that includes building low-rise apartments next to single-family detached homes. Seriously! Or the most ridiculous one yet: our local state university, which was once at the edge of town, but is now mostly surrounded, has a large amount of undeveloped space - intentionally, so that it could expand. They are building some dorms. On their own land. To house college students. And the nearby residents are losing their shit over it. God forbid a college houses college students on campus!

But this is writ large all across our state. California desperately needs to increase density as our population grows - particularly in the coastal cities where the jobs are booming. But get this:

80% of our residential-zoned land is zone for single family homes only.

Say what?? We have some of the most populous urban areas in the world, to say nothing of the nation, and it’s nearly all sprawl. So far, attempts to force localities to allow five story apartments near transit have not succeeded. Eventually, I believe they will, because something has to give. If you already own a house in LA, I guess you are set, but younger people cannot afford to live there. So people are living in cars, RVs, and on the streets.

These are all complex issues with difficult solutions. But ultimately, the status quo cannot be sustained - and my children’s generation know this. What is needed is what they have: a shift in the way of thinking. As the author puts it, our current system seems designed as though the city existed purely for commerce, rather than for the people that commerce was thought to enrich. The city needs to belong to all of us.

To get there, we need to stop measuring the success of a city by its median income, or its property values, but by the happiness of those who live there - and that means everyone, not just the wealthiest.

I highly recommend this book as a starting point for the discussion. While Montgomery shows the problems well, and offers a look at ways they have been addressed around the world, this book isn’t intended as a detailed blueprint. And it is unclear if a single blueprint will work everywhere. Montgomery’s central point is excellent, however. We have made poor decisions in how we plan our cities, and have created a situation where fixing them will be difficult.

Overcoming regulation, inertia, and public opinion will be a tough task - but the conversation is already shifting as it becomes obvious that the status quo is unacceptable, particularly for the next generation. California has started to explore some options, as our very success as the world’s fifth largest economy has exposed the weakness in our current model. But we have the opportunity to find ways to make positive and innovative change, as we have in the past.

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Just a fun article that is related: what if, instead of designing our cities around male breadwinners commuting to a 9-5 job, we built them around everyone else? After all, there are more women, children, and elderly than working-age males...

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One more thing: I actually like cars. I love driving, for the most part. I wrench on my own vehicles, and drive a stick shift.

But by “driving” I mean propelling the car forward at a reasonable speed on the open road. I do not mean sitting in traffic, because that just plain sucks. And, for that matter, while I don’t mind driving to and from work (as I said, I have a short commute and flexible hours, so traffic is rarely an issue on an average day), I would be fine with catching transit or biking to work - I’ve driven that road a lot.

I also HATE trying to find parking. Which is why my preference would be to use transit in San Francisco (or other major cities) whenever possible. Now if LA would just get its act together…